Verge Coin Struck With A Severe Attack, Now Forced To Hard Fork

After getting millions of coins in the donation to reveal its mysterious partnership, Verge coin has now got hit with a 51 percent attack that resulted in the loss of about 250,000 coins. Now the company is forced to do a hard fork as a solution to resolve the issue.

Verge coin gets hit with a 51% attack, losing thousands of coins

Recently, Verge gained a good rise in its prices in the light of an over-hyped announcement of its partnership for which the developers asked for a huge donation from the Verge community to reveal the name of the partner. About 20 million coins were donated and the company has yet to disclose who is the mysterious partner.

Now, the news of Verge being hit with a 51 percent attack has surfaced. The information of attack was posted on the Bitcointalk forum explaining that a bug has invaded the code of the coin that basically allows the attacker to imitate the timestamps and further create a new block by utilizing the same algorithm.

In the regular scenario, to create a new block, a different algorithm should be used so that a pool of miners or a single miner can’t control the XVG hashrate. But this time, the attacker exploited the XVG code to mine multiple blocks about seconds apart. However, the attacker stopped after a few hours only to provide the confirmation of blocks. This triggers the need for a rollback of the blockchain so that damage can be repaired.

The lead developer of Verge, Justin posted emergency commit, which was successful at the second attempt to fix the problem temporarily. Now, a hard fork will be initiated so that the issue can be resolved for once and all.

However, the Verge community is quick to dismiss the news by calling it even fake and FUD. Apparently, the attacker further taunted the team with “Hey Verge Team, get some real developers and fix your code.”

Also, read: AntPool Announces Monero (XMR) Hard Fork On April 6

Hard fork is the only solution while the prices take a dip

This 51 percent attack is quite a rare occurrence as one require more than 14 exahashes of power to control bitcoin’s majority of hashrate which is a bit lower for altcoins, and it is quite close to impossible to achieve.

Though the Verge coin team tried to downplay the situation, the thing is all the verge wallets are out of sync and the blockchain snapshot is stuck at block 2007364. It has been claimed by Verge that about 250,000 XVG had been stolen, while some are claiming it to be 3.9 million coins.

It had been a rollercoaster ride for Verge what with its Twitter getting hacked, privacy leaks, looking for a donation from its community and now this attack, though through this all XVG enthusiasts remain unfazed.

Verge coin had been experiencing a good price rise on the anticipation of an upcoming big announcement which took a hit with this attack and Verge coin is now down at $0.060225.   

How severe do you think the attack really is? Do you think the verge team is toning down the seriousness of attack? Will it hit the verge prices as severely?